Chris Wahl “I Don't Like the Germans” – Even Herzog Started in Bavaria
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Chris Wahl “I don’t like the Germans” – Even Herzog Started in Bavaria When Werner Herzog was interviewed by Jonathan Demme in the TimesCenter in New York on June 10, 2008, he took every opportunity to express antipathy toward Germany and sympathy for Bavaria, the region of Germany in which he grew up.1 This chapter investigates the reasons behind Herzog’s bifurcated relationship to his homeland—to his Heimat—and for his eventual emigration to California. It also analyzes the special meaning Herzog’s Bavarian heritage holds for his work. Bavaria has a particular significance within the Federal Republic of Germany. In terms of square area it is Germany’s largest region, and it is the most powerful economically. However, it is also the most politically and religiously conservative of the German states (Bundesländer). Prior to the establishment of the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck, the Kingdom of Bavaria long maneuvered between Prussia and Austria, central Europe’s two major powers, with the goal of protecting its autonomy as much as it could.2 Their desire for sovereignty has continued to this day and expresses itself in the often-heard slogan, “we are who we are” (wir sind wir, or mir san mir when said in the Bavarian dialect). On the political level the typical Bavarian consciousness expresses itself in the fact that the regional political party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which was founded in Würzburg after World War II, has resisted subordination to the larger national party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Even today the CSU operates as a sister party to the CDU, which allows it to act as a spearhead against both national and European federalisms.3 Two businesses whose calling cards directly refer to their Bavarian origins are the soccer team FC Bayern-Munich (FC Bayern München), founded in 1900, and the car and motorcycle manufacturer BMW (Bavarian Motor Works, or Bayerische Motoren Werke AG), which was first formed under the name Rapp Motorworks in 1913. Both organizations claim to embody the top of their class. Within Germany Bavaria is infamously proud of having the country’s ostensibly—and perhaps genuinely—most challenging secondary school exam (Abitur). For these reasons, it was hardly surprising when Edmund Stoiber, Bavaria’s Minister-President from 1993–2007, uttered the following sentence in the course of the 2005 federal elections: “If everywhere else things were as they are in Bavaria, we would have no problems at all. It’s only that, ladies and gentlemen, we have large parts of the population who unfortunately aren’t as wise as we.”4 This sort of unflinching arrogance has likely been an obstacle to having a Bavarian Minister-President elected to the office of Chancellor.5 The task the CSU assigned itself from the very beginning, and which it still today attempts to discharge, is the building of a democratic peoples’ party that the political right can claim, one not perceived as standing for extreme positions and—more important—for extreme actions. Munich, Bavaria’s capital, was after all the site of Hitler’s Putsch in November 1923 when the Nazi Party (the NSDAP) made their first brutal stab at usurping power. Ernst Röhm, who was born in Munich in 1887, played a prominent role in the attempt. As a veteran officer of World War I, Röhm led the Nazi thugs, Hitler’s “Storm Division” (the Sturmabteilung or SA), until he was murdered in 1934. Munich is also home to the building that served from 1930 to 1945 as the NSDAP headquarters, otherwise known as the “Brown House,” in which Adolf Wagner, the party’s infamous regional director resided. Wagner’s repressive measures clearly surpassed the “usual” ones. The counterpart of this brutish and inane twentieth-century tradition was the intrepid and uninhibited Anarchist movement that shared many members with Munich’s Soviet Council (Räterrepublik), and which established itself in April and May 1919, only four short years prior to the Putsch. Most of that group’s participants met with a grim demise. And of course the Scholl siblings—Hans and Sophie—along with their fellow resistors from Munich’s renowned Ludwig Maximilian University have not been forgotten long after the Nazi era. Their group, “The White Rose,” refused to be silent, and they paid for their refusal with their lives. Years after World War II, in June 1963, the “Schwabing Riots” broke out in Munich. In the tradition of Schwabing—the city’s bohemian district—the riots served as a prelude to Europe’s subsequent youth rebellion. Peter Fleischmann’s documentary Autumn of the Dead-beats (Herbst der Gammler, 1967) offers a striking portrait of the “asocial” element that converged in Schwabing over the course of that decade. Rioters clashed not only with the police but with the city’s “normal” citizens as well. It is no wonder that large numbers of people gathered in Munich at the time; the fresh cultural winds of the Federal Republic were rushing in, as was typified by the numerous filmmakers who found themselves there.6 Among them was Herzog, who was born in Munich and has repeatedly emphasized that the city has changed for the worse over time. Herzog declares: “Munich is a chic and empty city. It is empty of meaning” (2008: 64). He links the city’s transformation to a distortion of its original Bavarian character. In conversation with Laurens Straub, Herzog observes: “As you describe [the Bavarian character], it no longer exists. Its traces have been washed away. Munich, for example, the Bavarian capitol, is more or less predominantly occupied by Prussians, the enemies, so to speak, of Bavarianness.”7 What has been washed away is the sometimes absurd give and take between the extremisms of tradition and individualism. This is surely what Herzog is referring to when he speaks of the Bavarian soul. According to him, both of the Munich personalities, the comedian and film-producer 2 Karl Valentin as well as the writer, director and painter Herbert Achternbusch, gained—or were granted—a deep insight into that soul. In the latter case, the author’s insight is apparent in the template he provided for Herzog’s film Heart of Glass (1976).8 Herzog’s early twelve-minute short film Precautions Against Fanatics (1969) clearly speaks to the Bavarian nature. According to Herzog the film deals with “people who are under a great deal of pressure. The pressure comes, first of all, from the fact that they are prominent people and see themselves that way, and second, that they have been put under the external pressure of a foolish task. Then, all at once, something pours out of them … ! Like physicists who experiment with materials when they are trying to learn about an alloy inside and out—how it responds to extreme heat, extreme pressure, extreme radiation and the like” (Herzog 1976: 125—126).9 Herzog’s film portrays various men protecting racehorses from a vaguely defined group of “fanatics.” The horses’ guardians make silly speeches in the company of animals and they make themselves look ridiculous. An old and apparently confused man, who speaks in the Bavarian dialect, tries repeatedly to disrupt the horse-keepers’ work and drive them from the racing field. The question soon arises: who is really the fanatic and who is helpless; is it the horses or their ostensible protectors? This inversion, if one may formulate things this way, refers not only to a meteorological phenomenon often found in Bavaria, but also describes a rhetorical figure, one by which principles of uncertainty and reversal come into play. It is in some respects particular to Bavarian culture, where social pressure and personal freedom appear as extreme poles. Herzog returns to this trope in almost all of his films—often relying on the presence of animals, which makes us take note of animalistic characteristics in people—such that one may be tempted to refer to a “Herzogian inversion.” Since the start of his career Herzog was fiercely attacked in the public sphere, and inversion arose as a stylistic means of defense in his films. It subsequently came to be employed as a strategy for defending himself in interviews. In a workshop conducted in 1979 by the film critic Roger Ebert in Chicago, Herzog recounted: “In Germany, in my own country, people have tried to label me personally as an eccentric, as some sort of strange freak that does not fit into any of their patterns” (Walsh 1979: 9). But Herzog rejects such reproaches; precisely because they come from the majority, they are wrong. History has proven that mass tastes are the material of eccentricity. Along precisely these lines one can point to an interview six years earlier in which Herzog said: I believe it is the rest of them who are the outsiders. The real eccentric of our time is Peter Alexander. When they look back from the year 2010, he will seem completely laughable, eccentric and unhinged, just as it looks to us today in the case of Wilhelm II, who at that time seemed to stand at the center of things. Now he seems ridiculous and wildly eccentric, whereas an apparent outsider, like the Swiss author Robert Walser, who lived at the edge of 3 the world and sat for thirty-five years in a madhouse, formulated things in his time that remain valid for us today (Borski 1973: 6).10 In the mid-1970s it was still an act of anarchic inversion to call Peter Alexander, the beloved singer, actor, and entertainer, who so many mothers once longed to have for their son-in-law, an eccentric.11 Today, however, Alexander’s pop-hit films from the 1960s including And Get This One to Bed by Eight (… und sowas muss um acht ins Bett, Werner Jacobs, 1965) are indeed happily consumed as “trash cinema.” Those who grab the limelight of the Zeitgeist will be silly in retrospect, but those who create something unique in opposition to fashionable trends, will survive over the long haul, even if they are only taken seriously after their deaths.